Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End

Also by Sara M. Evans

Personal Politics

Born For Liberty

TIDAL WAVE

HOW WOMEN CHANGED
AMERICA AT CENTURY’S END

SARA M. EVANS

FREE PRESS

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Copyright © 2003 by Sara M. Evans

First Free Press paperback edition 2004

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

            Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret).

Tidal wave: the story of the modern women’s movement and how it
continues to change America / Sara M. Evans

p. cm

Includes biblioographical references and index.

1. Women—United States—History

2. Feminism—United States—History

HQ 1426 E938 2003

305.42/0973 21       2002033926

ISBN: 0-02-909912-9
0-7432-5502-X (Pbk)

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3553-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5502-8

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TO ELAINE TYLER MAY,
RIV-ELLEN PRELL,
AND
THE MANY WOMEN
WHO HAVE TAUGHT ME JUST HOW
POWERFUL SISTERHOOD CAN BE.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
ANY FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES
have aided me in the years I worked on
Tidal Wave
, and I must apologize in advance in the sure conviction that I will not remember all of them. My initial editor, Joyce Seltzer, first hatched the idea with me and helped to frame my thinking as I started into the project a decade ago. Even after she left Free Press, she cheered my work from the sidelines and I have always appreciated her wisdom, enthusiasm, and friendship.

Since the early years of off and on work on this project, I have had the good fortune to enjoy the assistance of current and former graduate students at the University of Minnesota. They not only gathered materials but also challenged me intellectually and made this a better book. I am extremely grateful to Katherine Meerse, Chris Sharpe, Mari Trine, Beth Salerno, Josephine Fowler, Mike Lansing, and Sharon Leon. The time to do this work and the ability to hire assistants were made possible by grants from the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota, the McKnight Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center.

The critical feedback of colleagues has also been invaluable. From early papers presented at the University of Minnesota workshop on comparative women’s history and Center for Advanced Feminist Studies to a round-table at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s history I have received thoughtful and provocative responses. I owe more than I can say to many groups of friends and colleagues who have listened, read, and encouraged both directly and indirectly: These include Group 22, the Serendipity group, the Comparative Women’s History
Workshop, my Re-Imagining small group, participants in sessions at professional meetings, and the many campus and community groups who allowed me to try out ideas in their early stages. Cheri Register and Charlotte Bunch read chapter drafts and responded to ideas in their early form. Linda Gordon, Rosalind Baxandall, Elaine Tyler May, Riv-Ellen Prell, Sally Kenney, Barbara Welke, Chuck Dayton, and Josephine Fowler read the complete (or nearly complete) manuscript. Their feedback sharpened and clarified my thinking. For editorial clarification I am especially grateful to Bruce Nichols, my editor at The Free Press, and to Chuck Dayton. Chuck’s poetic sensibility, in particular, made this a better book. The flaws that remain are altogether my responsibility.

Tidal Wave
is about the power of sisterhood, and I have experienced that power in my own life. I dedicate this book to two of these sister-friends, Elaine Tyler May and Riv-Ellen Prell, who have been a continual source of both intellectual and personal support for more than a quarter century. Their friendship across the decades is an incalculable gift, and they stand in for the many others I would love to name.

My family has also been a constant source of sustenance. My parents, my brothers and sisters-in-law, and my children have supported my work over the years and also provided me with a context that keeps my priorities clear. My husband, Chuck Dayton, is the light of my life. This book was nearing completion when he showed up, but his support has been crucial. Now I look forward to the next phase of our adventurous life together.

—Sara M. Evans

July 2002

CONTENTS

Chapter One
The Way We Were; The Way We Are

Chapter Two
Personal Politics

Chapter Three
The Golden Years

Chapter Four
Undertow

Chapter Five
Crest

Chapter Six
Deep Currents

Chapter Seven
Resurgence

Notes

Index

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

—Seamus Heaney, from
The Cure at Troy

TIDAL WAVE

CHAPTER 1
The Way We Were;
The Way We Are

T
HE
“
FIRST WAVE
” of women’s rights activism in the United States built slowly from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, finally cresting in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women the most fundamental right of citizenship, the vote. It swelled slowly and steadily, riding this single, symbolic issue. By contrast, a “secoud wave” of women’s rights activism in the last half of the century arose almost instantly in a fast-moving and unruly storm, massive from the very outset. This driving storm, with shifting winds and crosscurrents, never focused on a single issue and sometimes seemed to be at war as much within itself as with patriarchy. Yet that storm, with all its internal conflicts, produced a tidal wave of feminism that washed over the United States and changed it forever.

It is startling to realize that in the early 1960s married women could not borrow money in their own names, professional and graduate schools regularly imposed quotas of 5-10 percent or even less on the numbers of women they would admit, union contracts frequently had separate seniority lists for women and men, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. It was perfectly legal to pay women and men differently for exactly the same job and to advertise jobs separately: “Help Wanted—Men” and “Help Wanted—Women.”

Feminism, the broad banner under which the second wave named itself, not only shattered a set of legal structures that upheld inequalities between women and men but also challenged prevailing “commonsense”
everyday practices built on the assumption that women were naturally docile, domestic, and subordinate. Should a corporate secretary also be an “office wife” who serves coffee and buys birthday presents for the boss’s wife? Should etiquette demand that men hold open doors for women but not the reverse? Must women change their names upon marriage? Can men tolerate having a female boss? Can women operate heavy machinery or wield surgical knives with meticulous precision? Must women always be the ones to make and serve coffee? Would successful businessmen take legal advice from female lawyers? Can language accommodate the possibility that firemen, policemen, and chairmen might, in fact, be women? Are women’s incomes, in fact, secondary? Is a woman working outside the home by definition a “bad mother”? Is a man whose income cannot support his family by definition a failure at manhood? Can rape occur within a marriage?

Many of these issues remain unresolved decades later. Certainly, ongoing inequalities and injustices, such as sexual harassment, unequal pay, job discrimination, female poverty, and restrictions on reproductive rights, are easy to document while the cultural debate on “women’s place” continues apace. In many ways the legal structure has changed. but the vision of equality that undergirds those changes continues to be illusive. Women’s opportunities for work and for equal compensation remain systematically limited. The structure of work outside the home and the continued expectation that women have primary responsibility for child care and housework still force mothers into impossible choices between the demands of work and of family. And in the United States. as throughout the world, women continue to face unconscionable levels of violence and harassment.

The democratic mobilization of women to challenge inequality and to claim their civic right to be full participants in making changes and solving the problems of the twenty-first century will be essential for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it has always been needed. I use the word
feminism
to name that mobilization and the egalitarian ideas that inspire it. The term “feminism” came into being in late nineteenth century France and was adopted by a segment of the U.S. movement for woman suffrage (the vote) in the 1910s. Those early feminists sought cultural as well as legal
change. In the early 1970s, women’s rights activists adopted feminism as a common label, bridging enormous ideological and strategic differences. Should women work inside existing institutions, such as the political party system, universities, and corporations, or should they create new ones? Should they prioritize economic rights, reproductive rights, or cultural change? Should they seek alliances with men? Can they work simultaneously on the problems of race, poverty, and militarism while maintaining a focus on sexual equality? The differences among feminists are so deep that some regularly challenge others’ credentials as feminists. Yet the energy of the storm that drives them all comes from their shared challenge to deeply rooted inequalities based on gender.

For the purposes of this book, it makes no sense to insist on a more precise definition of the term “feminist”: my focus is on the movement itself in all its diversity of ideas, constituencies, strategies, and organizations. There are, however, some distinctive characteristics of that movement as it has ebbed and flowed between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps its most distinctive characteristic has been the challenge to the boundary between the “personal” and the “political” captured in an early slogan, “The Personal Is Political.” Under this banner, the movement politicized issues that had long been deemed outside the purview of “politics,” including sexuality, domestic violence, and the exercise of authority within the family. It also confronted the ancient association of men and maleness with public life (politics and power) and women and femaleness with domesticity (personal life and subordination). The result was a far more radical challenge (in the sense of
fundamental
, going to the roots) than efforts simply to gain admission for women into the public world of civic and economic rights. It raised questions about the nature of politics and about our very understanding of maleness and femaleness with all it implies for personal relationships, sexuality, and the family, and in so doing, it questioned one of the most fundamental and intimate forms of hierarchy, one that has been used in myriad contexts to explain, justify, and naturalize other forms of subordination. The result of this feminist challenge has been a political, legal, and cultural maelstrom that continues to this day.

I argue here that the brilliant creativity and the longevity of feminism in the late twentieth century is grounded in the breathtaking claim that the personal is political. At the same time, this confluence of personal-private and public-political contained the seed of the movement’s repeated episodes of fragmentation and self-destruction. On the one hand, “the personal is political” empowered both individuals and groups to challenge inequities that the culture defined as natural. Women sued corporations and unions; invented new institutions, such as havens for battered women; created journals, day care centers, and coffeehouses; ran for public office; and wrote new laws and lobbied them through. On the other hand, the linkage of personal and political led some to a search for purity, for “true” feminism in the realm of ideas and the formula for a perfectly realized feminist life. The pursuit of perfection made it difficult to entertain complexity, sliding easily into dogmatism. Differences of opinion and lifestyle betrayed the “true faith” and could not be tolerated. Thus, this is a history rife with contradiction: growth and fragmentation, innovation and internal conflict. One cannot understand it without exploring the interplay of these contradictory tendencies, because they are inextricably linked both to the movement’s capacity to reinvent itself and to the necessity to do so. Repeatedly pronounced “dead,” feminism in the late twentieth century has again and again risen phoenix-like in new and unexpected contexts, unnoticed by those who attended the funeral.